3 men aboard USS Kennedy share stories about Cuban missile crisis

Sunday

Oct 28, 2012 at 12:01 AMOct 28, 2012 at 1:46 PM

As the country remembers the Cuban missile crisis 50 years ago, history came to life Saturday at Battleship Cove, where three men that served the Navy aboard the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and who were an essential part of that confrontational blockade with Soviet Russia shared their stories.

As the country remembers the Cuban missile crisis 50 years ago, history came to life Saturday at Battleship Cove, where three men that served the Navy aboard the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and who were an essential part of that confrontational blockade with Soviet Russia shared their stories.

A receptive audience that ranged from school-age Sea Cadets to others who served on this destroyer and others like it listened to the eyewitness account. They listened indoors in the PT Boat building, just steps from the USS Kennedy, preserved at Battleship Cove as a naval museum since 1974, after the ship was decommissioned.

Hitz conveyed that important sense of history in late October 1962 after the failed Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro the year before and supported by the CIA.

He described the “meaningful intelligence” the United States gathered through spies in the air and on the ground that the Soviets were setting up medium-range warhead missiles in Cuba 90 miles off the coast of Key West, Fla.

While the United States called about 140 ships that surrounded the Cuban island a quarantine, it was unequivocally a blockade and an “act of war,” Hitz said. It happened a short period after the United States had set up its own ballistic missiles near Russia in Turkey.

James Rucker of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, was a combat information officer stationed in the pilothouse aboard the USS Kennedy on early morning of Oct. 26, 1962, when small contingencies from his destroyer and the USS John R. Pierce tracked, intercepted and boarded the Lebanese freighter Marucla, commissioned by Russia.

“We tracked her all night. And at dawn’s first light,” Rucker said, warned the freighter they’d board.

Rucker did not board that ship, but two others sitting next to him did. They were Edward Mass — a damage control officer in charge of maintaining the ship’s electricity, water and essential systems, and who spoke “broken Russian” — and Paul Sanger, the ship’s communications officer. They were two of the six that did board the intercepted Marucla days after President John F. Kennedy announced the Cuban blockade.

“We decided to board unarmed,” said Mass, who lives in McHenry, Ill., and traveled to attend the symposium.

Sanger, from Atlanta, Ga., helped coordinate with USS Kennedy curator Richard Angelini the weekend anniversary program of the Cuban missile crisis focused on the historic destroyer and its mission; a reception Thursday night with Kennedy sister and former ambassador Jean Ann Kennedy Smith; and Saturday’s firsthand account.

Among telling and even humorous accounts was one Sanger shared of how they used 18th century John Adams Navy regulations with flags to alert the Marucla of their boarding.

“They answered back immediately,” Mass said of the Lebanese ship.

Hitz asked the USS Kennedy servicemen if there were Russian sailors aboard. He was told no.

But there were Greeks who spoke broken English better than Mass’ broken Russian, he said. Another light-hearted tale Mass told was upon boarding the Marucla, with tensions high. At one point, the Americans suggested having Greek coffee. With a quick nod, the subordinated sailors brought back their home brew, Mass said, “laced with Ouzo,” Greece’s popular and potent alcoholic drink.

Among important parts of their story, Mass said under tarps they found vehicles used in production. But they never found “any offensive weapons aboard” that could be brought to Cuba, they said.

The freighter was allowed to continue to Havana, although it would be about three weeks more before the USS Kennedy would start its voyage home and away from the blockade, Rucker said.

He said the day in 1962 the Kennedy would reach America’s shores would be, ironically, Dec. 7, “a day that will live in infamy” when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Among many interesting points and other anecdotes, the three USS Kennedy guests told an audience of about 75 people how the destroyer possessed tactical nuclear missiles. But they were crude, with a reach of about five miles, Rucker said.

“Did you realize the historical significance of what you were doing?” Hitz asked at one point.

“No,” Rucker shrugged and grinned.

“I tried to tell my children, but they never believed me,” Sanger said to more laughs.

“I think any time you’re in the middle of something, you don’t realize it until you get away from it,” said Rucker, who only saw the USS Kennedy again for the first time only three years ago after the many years away from that experience.

Before that time, Rucker said of the USS Kennedy, “I didn’t know she still existed.”

During a Saturday morning commemoration ceremony of the Cuban missile crisis, Rucker asked those that served on the Kennedy and the Pierce during the blockade to stand; then those that had served on the two destroyers at any time; then those that served on any United States Navy destroyers.

The group of servicemen kept growing larger.

Rucker said later that the Navy destroyers were fast ships with thin hulls built to last relatively short periods and thought to be expendable after completing their missions.

The servicemen that stood, he said, understood “the bonds between us. … You didn’t need words.”

But there’s a new mission that Battleship Cove and supporters of the USS Kennedy have undertaken to repair the rusted hull and aging of the destroyer museum, which is now designated a National Historic Landmark. It comes at a high cost, estimated at $14 million.

On Saturday morning, Rucker, who’s volunteered to head what’s now a six-person committee to save her, evoked the words of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, born in South Kingstown, R.I., and of 19th-century naval fame.

“Don’t give up the ship,” Rucker said of the USS Kennedy.

“We can’t give up the ship because she’s the only one left and she’s original,” he said.